Thanks to Your Digital Record, an online service created by Julian Kelly ’04, Michael Martinez ’04 and Chris O’Connell ’04, musicians may now upload liner notes, music and artwork to create digital albums that can be put anywhere online, from Facebook to a blog. Founded in June with the help of advisors Geoff Vitt ’04, who works for Google, and Matthew Stevenson ’04, who works for Facebook, the site now has more than 150 registered members. Citing dissatisfaction with the music industry’s online focus of selling individual tracks over albums, O’Connell told The New York Times’ Fort Greene blog: “An author doesn’t write a book and sell it in chapters; the same should be said for musicians.”

Career ambassador Frank Ricciardone ’73 has left the U.S. Institute of Peace to take on a new mission as deputy ambassador at the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. This marks the first appointment of a deputy ambassador by the State Department (typically a deputy chief of mission gets the nod). “The appointment is presumably intended to provide [Ambassador U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl] Eikenberry with high-level diplomatic expertise, but some believe it also gives State a backchannel to the embassy,” reporter Roland Flamini wrote in The New Republic in August. D. William “Bill” Subin ’63 was featured on ABC’s Primetime in September after successfully defending a New Jersey state trooper against vehicular homicide charges in June. Two teenage New Jersey sisters were killed when Officer Robert Higbee’s patrol car collided with their vehicle while he was engaged in a high-speed pursuit. Subin told The Philadelphia Inquirer in June that criminal charges should never have been brought against the officer. “This trooper was doing his duty,” Subin said. The trial “was never going to change the sad fact that those two girls lost their lives.” John Kitzhaber ’69, Oregon’s Democratic governor from 1995 to 2003, announced his candidacy in September for a historic third term. The former ER physician, who also served 14 years in the state legislature, achieved a national reputation for his innovative Oregon Health Plan, which expanded healthcare coverage to tens of thousands of previously uninsured. “I believe that Oregonians are ready to embrace a different kind of politics and to make the kind of tough decisions that will be required to create such a future,” Kitzhaber told OregonLive.com in early September. Alex Berger ’02 wrote the pilot episode of Glenn Martin, DDS, a claymation sitcom about the cross-country RV travels of a dentist and his family that premiered on Nick at Nite in mid-August. “It’s broad, accessible comedy—the kind of show where you aren’t sure what to expect, but once you sit down you keep watching,” the New York Daily News wrote in an August 17 review. Berger is also developing the feature film, Harrison for America, with Jesse Singer ’02. The son of a Georgia sharecropper and the youngest of 13, Jesse Spikes ’72 overcame tremendous odds to earn a Rhodes Scholarship and graduate from Harvard Law School. Now the lawyer is facing long odds in the Atlanta mayoral race as he attempts, with limited campaign funds, to increase his name recognition and move up from fourth place in the polls in the final weeks leading up to the November 3 election. “I’m not a politician. I’m not running to be in politics,” Spikes told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I’m running to have an impact on this city. I want to fix this—and then go home.” Angela McConney ’90, in her capacity as co-chair of the ministry commission of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, toured the Holy Land for 10 days last summer. “The Palestinians were happy to welcome us,” McConney, general counsel to Massachusetts’ Civil Service Commission, told reporter Yawu Miller ’89 of the Bay State Banner in late August. “The [Episcopal] bishop of Jerusalem, Suheil Dawani, wanted us to know that Jerusalem is our home. He wants Christians from all over the world to see Jerusalem as their home.” After 35 years as an engineer with Westinghouse, Walter C. Anderson ’47, Th’48, now spends his days with fourth-graders. It began when his neighbor, an elementary school teacher, brought her students to visit his vegetable garden. (He still remembers how two boys tried his jalapeno peppers.) Since that 1986 visit he has spent three hours every school day tutoring students in math and reading at Southport Elementary School in Southport, North Carolina. When he had his left leg amputated 10 years ago, he stopped by the school on his way home from the hospital. His wife pushed him into the classroom in a wheelchair, and he gave a lesson on his medical procedure. “The kids are fascinated with my artificial leg, so I use that as my first lesson every year,” he told the Wilmington Star News in August. The October issue of Vanity Fair features an inside look at the tenure of Henry Paulson Jr. ’68 as Treasury secretary during the Bush administration. Writer Todd Purdum conducted eight hours of taped interviews over 15 months while Paulson was in office, including one session in which the former Dartmouth offensive lineman (nicknamed “The Hammer”) repeatedly excused himself because he was violently ill and then returned to continue the interview. Purdum wrote, “In the months to come, I would think of Paulson’s perseverance in the face of gastric distress as a metaphor for the way he persevered through the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression.” Paulson’s memoir, On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System, is due in January.